Sophisticated contact centers attempt to match a customer to the most-qualified agent. This has many benefits including increased customer satisfaction as well as a higher potential for increasing contact center revenue/decreasing contact center costs. The objective of having a well-matched agent and customer is often contrary to other objectives in the contact center such as minimizing customer wait time, minimizing agent idle time, etc. Because of these contradicting objectives, contact centers often forego deferring any match to wait for a well-matched situation.
There are times when deferring a work assignment decision is safe and times when it is not safe. Most contact centers do not consider the risks associated with waiting to defer decisions, but rather apply a one-size-fits-all routing algorithm. In particular, the risk of customer abandon is of special concern.
The problem with the approach described above is that there are many situations where it would actually benefit all aspects of the contact center to wait for a better agent-to-customer match. The problem is determining when it is better to hold on and wait and when it is better to fold and just take the next available customer/agent.